Pot Of Food Emoji

A deep pot of steaming food, usually rendered as a brown stew with chunks of meat, potatoes, or vegetables bubbling in broth. 🍲 is the generic "home-cooked meal in a pot" emoji, covering beef stew, chili, chicken soup, pot-au-feu, cocido, gumbo, nikujaga, nabe, and every other one-vessel dish where a long simmer does the work.

It lives at the comfort-food end of the food keyboard. Where 🍕 and 🍔 are fast and loud, 🍲 is slow and quiet: the pot on Sunday, the soup when someone's sick, the dish you make when winter arrives. Dictionary.com's emoji guide describes it as shorthand for "soups, stews, and other brothy, saucy, and slurpy foods," and notes it's often attached to messages about hunger, craving, or an unusually good meal.

Approved in Unicode 6.0 (2010) as U+1F372U+1F372 POT OF FOOD. It was one of the original food emojis imported from Japanese carrier sets, which is why the visual feels closer to a Japanese nabe or nikujaga pot than to any specific Western stew.

Home-cooked everything. Recipe posts, crockpot photos, "look what I made" captions. When 🍕 feels too casual and 🍽️ feels too restaurant-formal, 🍲 is the emoji for something you actually cooked yourself.

Winter and rainy-day content. Soup season memes, "it's cold outside" posts, cozy aesthetic Instagram. The steam rising from the pot does the emotional work. Pairs naturally with 🧣🌧️🕯️.

Sick-day care. "Made you soup" texts. Grandma energy. 🍲 appears in replies to "I'm not feeling great today" more than almost any other food emoji besides 🍵.

Comfort-food cravings. "Need this right now" captions under a stew video. 🍲😋 is the standard "I'm hungry for something hearty" combo.

Multicultural meal posts. Because it doesn't look like any specific national dish, 🍲 is the default for Ethiopian wat, Moroccan tagine, Korean jjigae, Vietnamese pho, and dozens of other one-pot traditions that don't have their own dedicated emoji.

The one-pot meal is older than civilization. Before ovens, before plates, before the idea of "courses," there was a pot over a fire and whatever you had to put in it.

Almost every culture has a version. France has pot-au-feu, beef and root vegetables simmered for hours, which the Oxford Companion to Food calls "a dish symbolic of French cuisine" and which became associated with family Sundays after King Henry IV (1553-1610) famously said he wanted every peasant to afford "a chicken in the pot" each week. Spain has cocido, traced to the olla podrida that Cervantes described in Don Quixote around 1605, and which many historians link further back to adafina, the Sabbath stew of Spain's Sephardic Jews recorded in the 14th century. Louisiana has gumbo, a Creole stew that blends West African, French, Spanish, German, and Choctaw techniques into one pot. Japan has nikujaga, the meat-and-potato simmered dish known as ofukuro no aji ("mother's home cooking"). Latin America has sancocho, brought by Spanish settlers from the Canary Islands and adapted across Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Venezuela.

The emoji ignores all of this specificity on purpose. Because 🍲 was designed in Japan with no national flag, no identifying garnish, no recognizable spice, it became the default emoji for any one-pot dish a culture needs it to be.

• 🇫🇷 Pot-au-feu (France): Beef shin, marrow bones, and root vegetables simmered for 3-4 hours. Called "a dish symbolic of French cuisine" by the Oxford Companion to Food. Traditional Sunday meal, served with the broth first and meat second.
• 🇪🇸 Cocido (Spain): A chickpea stew with cured meats served in three acts (broth, chickpeas, meat). Cocido madrileño is Madrid's version; fabada is Asturia's bean-based cousin. Descended from 14th-century Sephardic adafina.
• 🇯🇵 Nabe & nikujaga (Japan): Nabe is communal hot pot, cooked on a tabletop burner. Nikujaga is sweet-savory meat and potatoes, ofukuro no aji, "the taste of mother." Both define Japanese winter home cooking.
• 🇰🇷 Jjigae (Korea): Soybean-paste, kimchi, and silken-tofu stews bubbling in earthenware ddukbaegi pots. Diners eat directly from the shared pot, no individual bowls.
• 🇺🇸 Gumbo (Louisiana): Creole stew layering West African okra, French roux, Spanish spice, and Choctaw filé into one pot. Britannica calls it "a party food", designed to feed a crowd.
• 🇻🇳 Phở (Vietnam): Beef-bone broth simmered for hours with star anise, cinnamon, and cardamom, served over rice noodles. The stockpot is where phở actually lives; the bowl is just the serving step.
• 🇪🇹 Wat (Ethiopia): Thick spiced stews (doro wat, misir wat, siga wat) eaten communally with injera flatbread. No utensils, the bread is the spoon and the plate.
• 🇲🇦 Tagine (Morocco): Slow-cooked stew named after the conical clay pot it's made in. Lamb with prunes, chicken with preserved lemon, or vegetable variations. The lid's cone shape traps steam and returns moisture to the pot.
• 🌴 Sancocho (Caribbean & Latin America): Brought by Canary Islands settlers and adapted across Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Colombia, and Panama. Yuca, plantain, ñame, and multiple meats in one pot.
• 🇭🇺 Goulash (Hungary): Paprika-heavy beef stew, originally cooked in a bogrács (cauldron) by cattle herders on the Great Hungarian Plain. The word comes from gulyás, "herdsman."

1. 2010Encoded in Unicode 6.0 as U+1F372 POT OF FOOD, imported from Japanese carrier emoji sets.
2. 2015Added to Emoji 1.0. Apple, Google, and Samsung all render it as a dark pot with steaming brown stew, usually with visible potato and meat chunks.
3. 2019Samsung redesign (One UI 1.5) replaces its earlier cartoon look with a more photorealistic stew, aligning with Apple and Google's visual language.

In Japan, 🍲 usually reads as a nabe or nikujaga pot. Winter nabe meals are cooked at the table in a shared donabe clay pot, and the person who coordinates the ingredients is called the "nabe bugyo" (hot-pot magistrate). Nikujaga, meanwhile, is what Japanese recipe tests use to assess a new daughter-in-law.

In Korea, it's a jjigae pot. Doenjang-jjigae (soybean-paste stew), kimchi-jjigae, and sundubu-jjigae are eaten from the same communal vessel, with each person dipping their spoon straight into the bubbling pot.

In France, 🍲 carries the weight of pot-au-feu, which History Today calls the country's national dish. The pot is egalitarian: peasant in origin, respected by presidents, served on Sunday across class lines.

In Spain, it reads as cocido, a three-course meal from one pot (broth first, then chickpeas and vegetables, then meat). Madrid, Galicia, and Andalusia each have their own version.

In the American South, it's gumbo or red beans and rice. In West Africa, it's peanut stew or jollof. In the Caribbean, sancocho. In Ethiopia, wat. The emoji is culturally neutral precisely so every kitchen can claim it.

• •King Henry IV of France reportedly said he wanted every peasant in his kingdom to be able to afford "a chicken in the pot" each Sunday. The line became shorthand for political prosperity, and pot-au-feu became France's unofficial national dish.
• •Spain's cocido likely descends from adafina, the slow-simmered Sabbath stew of Sephardic Jewish communities recorded in the 14th century. The dish was cooked overnight on Fridays so observant families could eat hot food on Saturday without lighting a fire.
• •Cervantes mentions a stew called olla podrida in Don Quixote (1605), writing that the knight's daily fare included "an olla more beef than mutton." That olla is the direct ancestor of modern Spanish cocido.
• •In Japan, nikujaga ("meat-potato") is called ofukuro no aji, literally "the taste of mother." It's the first dish many Japanese home cooks learn, and the dish they're judged on. Pork is standard in eastern Japan; beef dominates in the west.
• •Japanese nabe culture has its own unwritten etiquette. The person who manages the ingredients in a shared pot is the "nabe bugyo", a half-joking title borrowing from Edo-period magistrate ranks.
• •Louisiana gumbo gets its name from a West African word. According to Britannica, "gumbo" likely derives from "ki ngombo," a Bantu word for okra, brought to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. Okra is still one of the two classic thickeners, alongside filé (ground sassafras) from the Choctaw tradition.
• •Indian Ocean and Caribbean sancocho traditions both descend from the same Canary Islands base. Spanish settlers from the Canaries brought the dish to the Americas, where it absorbed local tubers (yuca, ñame, plantain) and became a national dish across several countries.
• •The pot emoji has no national flag, no identifying garnish, and no spice indicator. That ambiguity is a feature: because nothing locks it to one cuisine, it gets used for Ethiopian doro wat, Vietnamese pho, Moroccan tagine, and Hungarian goulash with equal frequency.

• •🍲 is U+1F372U+1F372. Common shortcodes: :stew::stew: (GitHub, Slack, Discord), :pot_of_food::pot_of_food: (CLDR).

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